[Note: This review is the third in a series. For the first two reviews click here and here.]

Juan Felipe Her­rera, Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems

In my expe­ri­ence, novel-​weight new and selected col­lec­tions of poetry offer two routes of approach. One is to read them as we read antholo­gies or jour­nals: as pools of poems we can dip into as our whims inspire or our needs demand. The other is to read straight through, to see what sense we can make of the whole. When we read the first way we read for the poems; when we read the second way, we end up (inevitably, I’ve found) read­ing for the poet.

I men­tion this because I sus­pect the dif­fer­ences between these two approaches matter more than usual for a book like Half of the World in Light, Juan Felipe Herrera’s col­lec­tion of new and selected poems. I can tell you with full con­fi­dence that the story of Half of the World in Light is a story of Her­rera fash­ion­ing him­self as a self-​consciously Chi­cano poet, and yet that descrip­tion, accu­rate as I am con­vinced it is, will tell you noth­ing about a poem like “6:01 am,” from Herrera’s 1996 book Love After the Riots:

Write to me. Marga.
The black taxi leaves plainly.
Two men fight the way men fight when
they are clumsy and won­der­ful. Cow­ards.
Next car.

I can go to bed now. My brother is away.
I mumble another place, build­ings with ragged win­dows.
Col­lared shirts, a little boy with a burn­ing cane,
a paint­ing of Hol­ly­wood in the for­ties.
A sports car with fog lights, the wet streets.

This gap between Herrera’s poems and what I’ll call his poetry does not, I insist, merely demon­strate the haz­ards of gen­er­al­iza­tion. It’s true that Her­rera is a ter­rif­i­cally ener­getic and pro­lific writer—he has writ­ten twenty-​four books, along with plays, film scripts, and music—and any neat reca­pit­u­la­tion of his career is bound to suffer some excep­tions. (Where, for exam­ple, to place a poem about Pan Am flight 103?) It’s also true, how­ever, that across the three hun­dred pages of Half of the World in Light we can dis­cern a story that is some­thing more and other than the sum of the sto­ries his poems tell: the story of a poet whose Whit­man­ian ambi­tion pushes him to speak not only about Chi­cano expe­ri­ence but also for it.

What con­cerns Her­rera most about this expe­ri­ence is the neither-​nor qual­ity of Chi­cano iden­tity, the expe­ri­ence of a people who who feel they lack both a home and a home coun­try. In “Exiles,” he brings this quandary into sharp focus: “Where is our exile?” he asks. “Who has taken it?” The theme returns in “Trop­i­cal Par­rots,” from 1994’s Roots of a Thou­sand Embraces:

For us

there are no Macro-​world. No foot­ing where we can re-
adjust our lan­guage and our shape. No enjamb­ments for
our sig­ni­fi­ca­tion. No ready-​made molds for our migrant-
shard body, breath. We do not wait to build our
mus­cu­lar­ity, our rebel tendon world. Too many have
tried and failed; an old reflex taken from the Master’s
theater.

Chi­cano expe­ri­ence is Herrera’s major sub­ject, but as Stephen Burt noted in the Times, Her­rera is “no mere recorder of social con­di­tions.” He is a poet, and across four decades he has worked his mate­r­ial in seem­ingly every style avail­able to the imag­i­na­tive writer: his­tor­i­cal, myth­i­cal, per­sonal, polit­i­cal, real­ist, sur­real. Flip to a random page of Half of the World in Light and you’re just as likely to find a densely descrip­tive auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal piece like “New York City Angelic”—in which Her­rera describes his father as a “shuf­fler with the right foot drag­gin’, talker, open-​cuento style, non­smoker, Bap­tist Mex­i­cano English-​speaking coat & hat man, white shirt and long johns”—as you are to find a poem like “Mobius,” in which the body described could be anyone’s and the nar­ra­tive frame is so far removed as to seem a mirage:

Maybe, here, the body

or appre­ci­a­tion is in the degrees of light, non-​line and
tex­ture, espe­cially when the light shaft becomes obscure,
half-lit—when it goes into the sutures behind the gesso of
the cast.

Herrera’s styl­is­tic profli­gacy is matched by a formal rest­less­ness that sees him bounc­ing from odd cross­word con­struc­tions to the clipped stan­zas that Rae Armantrout favors to unrhymed son­nets to journal-​like prose pas­sages. (Not all of his formal adven­tures are equally suc­cess­ful; I bogged down in longer, more typo­graph­i­cally taxing pieces like “Grafik.”)

The clos­est Her­rera comes to claim­ing a form for his own is a poetry of comma-​spliced clauses that pile up and pulse like traf­fic on a Cen­tral Valley free­way. Here it is in a poem from 2002’s Note­books of a Chile Verde Smuggler:

Lissen to my night, lissen to my dance, my
black feet land on the street pyres of poets and word blower lamps hang­ing
from their tiny hands, their mis­shapen podi­ums. We gather, we frost, we foam
on the corner between rails and con­crete, between condos and Plex­i­glas mini
fash­ion malls and barber shops col­ored in Hue­hue­te­nango orange stripes
mixed in with lilac.
—From “I, Cit­lalli ‘La Loca’ Cienfuegos”

It’s hard not to hear a Beat beat here, as the clauses crash for­ward like a Ker­ouac sen­tence or a Gins­berg line—hard, that is, until you listen to the CD that comes with Half of the World in Light. (In my head I’d heard Her­rera pound­ing away at the rhythms while a jazz drum­mer and a whistling audi­ence egged him on; I admit no small dis­ap­point­ment in hear­ing him read with the calm artic­u­la­tion of a public-​radio announcer.)

The tra­jec­to­ries traced by Herrera’s poems are so var­i­ous that it some­times seems a pair of covers is the only thing hold­ing Half of the World in Light together. But the per­spec­tive afforded by the col­lec­tion shows that these orbits all share a common center of grav­ity. As we progress through the book, the often dis­junc­tive sto­ries told by his poems give way to the sin­gu­lar story of Herrera’s own artis­tic ambi­tion. In a long piece called “Quentino’s Jour­nal,” he seems to name the guid­ing impulse of his career:

It’s nec­es­sary that the voice be spread out equally among all, choral at cer­tain moments and frac­tured and indi­vid­ual at others. The Jour­nal con­tains a thou­sand voices and one at the same time…. Will the Jour­nal be an eter­nal lyric? The voice is dark­blue; bear­ing wit­ness to the con­stant accel­er­a­tion of the impris­on­ment, bear­ing wit­ness to the grow­ing strug­gle for its liberation.

No one needs to tell Her­rera that a goal as grand as this is bound, at some level, to fail. (In a late poem he writes of “years waging futile wars with poetry until / I could not think of any­thing else.”) The cen­trifu­gal energy that threat­ens to render Half of the World in Light a mere mis­cel­lany stands as a nice metaphor for the pres­sure that awaits any poet who would seek to make him­self not just a voice but “the voice…a thou­sand voices and one at the same time.” What’s more, such an effort, for all its demo­c­ra­tic inspi­ra­tion, entails a basic elit­ism that brushes hard against the grain of our con­tem­po­rary egalitarianism.

And yet, and yet. While Herrera’s poetic dex­ter­ity makes him worth read­ing, it’s pre­cisely the scale of his ambi­tion that makes him com­pelling. Giving voice to a people is an ancient pre­rog­a­tive of art; to see a con­tem­po­rary poet take up that charge with­out embar­rass­ment or apol­ogy is noth­ing short of bracing.

+++

NB: After I fin­ished this review, Her­rera was awarded the 2008 NBCC award for poetry for Half of the World in Light, an award he shared with August Kleinzahler.